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The future of television is very vivid in some senses, and utterly obscure and muddled in others.

At last week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the latest cool thing rapidly gave way to the next cool thing. With four times the sharpness of the hi-def set you already own, ultra-high-definition TVs, on display for the first time at virtually every television maker's booth, were brilliant, crisp, and electric.

But at
Sharp6753.to -1.82648401826484%Sharp Corp. ADRU.S.: OTCUSD2.15
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(ticker: 6753.Japan), which had a gigantic booth at the Las Vegas convention center just as did the other stalwarts, Samsung Electronics (005930.Korea) and LG Electronics (066570.Korea), there was a "proof-of-concept" that left people awe-struck. What Sharp calls "8K" actually has 16 times the resolution of a hi-def set. It is unbelievable. To look at it up close, you could study each leaf on a tree in the pastoral scenes that Sharp played on the 85-inch demonstration model, as if scrutinizing a moving painting by a 19th-century master such as John Constable.

From a normal distance, watching an 8K TV, with each ripple on the lake really oozing, each crack in a mountain side defined, and the wool on the sheep grazing in the foreground clearly swaying in the breeze, it feels like you're watching in three dimensions without glasses.

That's all good, but it will take a long while for 8K or even UHD to become widely available. In the meantime, what captured most of the headlines was the computing industry's continued effort to produce so-called smart TV. That effort, quixotic and confusing, is far less likely to advance the basic act of television viewing anytime soon.

WHAT WAS READY TO BE rolled out last week were sets, and set-top boxes, that turn TV into a pastime filled with non-TV things, like conducting
Google
(GOOG) searches, sending your home movies to the TV, or browsing what's variously known as a "hub," or "home screen," a gaggle of icons that are supposed to provide recommendations of shows you might like.

The computing and television industries are in an awkward embrace, throwing lots of stuff against the wall to see what sticks.

As I watched the demonstrations of how to send pictures over a cellular network from my smartphone to my LG television set, or from the TV set to, believe it or not, the display on an LG refrigerator, I thought, "This is very complicated," even for a tech reporter with years spent fiddling with gadgets.

Samsung made much noise here with its latest smart televisions, showing off ways to speak commands to your TV from a smart remote control, and to have a "recommendations" service tell you what to watch. LG's "Magic Remote" will let you press a button and ask "what's the weather like?" and see the results displayed on screen.

Google, whose smart TV was met with lackluster results the first time around, has rebooted the effort, and there were several models on display, including set-top boxes from
Netgearntgr 0.7738607050730868%NETGEAR Inc.U.S.: NasdaqUSD58.6
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(NTGR), Asus, China's Hisense,
Sony
(SNE), Vizio, and TCL, along with a television set from
Lenovo Group
(992.HongKong), the world's second-largest PC maker, that actually runs a full-blown version of the Android operating system that Google provides for smartphones.

All of the chips that run those set-tops, and the Lenovo TV, are being provided by
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(MRVL), which won the business when Google decided to switch from the
Intelintc 0.16806722689075632%Intel Corp.U.S.: NasdaqUSD35.76
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(INTC) chips that Sony and others used in the first version of the Google TV. Google writes its software for Marvell chips and Marvell sells those chips to Sony and the others.

It's a coup for Marvell to be the sole supplier of microprocessors for the vast majority of Google TV boxes, and it could give the stock a real lift if consumers warm to Google TV 2.0.

Shares of Marvell are down 44% in the last year, amid worries about the disk-drive industry, for which Marvell supplies chips that control the operation—and a massive patent judgment against the company. Marvell is also suffering from the collapse of
Research In Motion
(RIMM), a prominent customer, for whom it supplies BlackBerry microprocessors.

But as I watched demos of how to use the remote to move through Google's menus on screen, it was apparent how far this vision of TV is from the beauty of UHD or 8K, turning it into what amounts to a bad Website.

The television is a social medium unlike any other in computing, points out Phil McKinney, the head of CableLabs, the R&D arm of
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(CMCSA) and the other cable operators around the world. McKinney, who took over as CableLabs' CEO last June, after many years at
Hewlett-Packardhpq -2.3514851485148514%HP Inc.U.S.: NYSEUSD15.78
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(HPQ), is in charge of steering many projects with a long, long horizon. They include problems such as how to adapt the cable plant to send as much as 10 gigabits of data per second to every home.

But many of the goals of enhancing that social experience in the living room are at an uncertain pass, McKinney tells me. After traipsing the halls of CES, he tells me that the industry is clearly coalescing around the view that the smartphone will be the remote control for many of us. You already have it with you all the time, and you understand how to operate it, which is more than can be said for the various remotes that ship with Google TV or Samsung's "hub" TV center. Those things are now seen as complex as what pilots contend with.

Why couldn't we just have the TV listen to us when we say, "TV, get me the last Giants game," I asked McKinney. Decades of research, he points out, including at CableLabs, have shown accurate natural-language commands to be a very difficult nut to crack.

LIKE THE TALE OF "Where's Waldo?" everyone wanted to know when the mythical
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(AAPL) television set would arrive. McKinney is skeptical, in his personal opinion, that Apple will go head to head with Samsung or LG selling large glass.

Longtime tech observer Rich Doherty of Envisioneering tells me that he saw numerous Apple employees wandering the floor in Las Vegas. "They were here not to glean ideas but to make sure the company is not blindsided," he tells me. It is a matter of when, not if, Apple will offer its own smart set, Doherty believes. But, he notes, it is also in Apple's interest to bide its time, keeping a muddled market guessing, until it sees what things really work in this new world of social television.